Holy Ambition - Develop a Dislocated Heart, Part 1

God is on a mission. He's looking for a very select group of people on the face of the earth in order to strongly support them, to empower them, to do amazing things in them and through them. Would you like to be that kind of person? Would you like to be one that he selects? Stick around.

Find out how. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. The mission of these daily programs is to intentionally disciple Christians through the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram. I'm Dave Druey, and we're so grateful you've joined us as Chip begins his series, Holy Ambition, turning God-shaped dreams into reality. Over the next several programs, Chip's going to help us discover how to live a life filled with purpose, satisfaction, and yes, even ambition to do great things for God. Now, before we begin, let me encourage you to try using Chip's message notes while you listen. They contain his outline, scripture references, and much more. Chip's notes will really help you remember what you hear, maybe even share what you're learning. To download these message notes, just go to the broadcasts tab at livingontheedge.org.

App listeners, tap fill in notes. But with all that said, let's join Chip now as he kicks off this series with his message, Develop a Dislocated Heart. For the eyes of the Lord go to and fro throughout the whole earth, that he might strongly support those whose hearts are fully his. Think on that with me, okay?

Get that in your head, in your mind. The eyes of the Lord, the Spirit of God in this room on this night are going up and down all through the aisles, and he's looking for a man or a student or a woman whose heart is fully his, and he promises if he could find one man or one woman or one student, he would strongly support it. What do venture capitalists do? They find people that have a dream, a vision, organization, skills, and a plan, and then when they find the right people with the right plan at the right time, they fund it.

And then they keep track and they bring about expertise. That's what God wants to do. He wants to fund your ministry vision, the Ephesians 2 10 calling on your life. And I want to tell you, we're going to talk about how to know if your heart is fully his, and if it is not, how to move week by week where he will do in you and through you things you never dreamed.

Because actually this book is full of stories of people that if you would have met them before they became apostles, or if you would have met them before they stood at the edge of the Red Sea, or if you would have met them just before, you know, the invaders were coming and they laid out this prayer before God and said, you know, there's a million or so of them and 300,000 of us, and we're going to be toast, and God if you don't do it, every single one, we're just ordinary people. And God cares about your relatives, and he cares about the people you work with, and he cares about the people that are right next door to you. And the fact the matter is, is that he'll strongly support you. He'll give you whatever you need. If you need courage, you need faith, you need money, you need staff, you need an idea, whatever you need, if God can find a man, a woman, or a student whose heart is fully his, he will do extraordinary things through ordinary people for his exclusive glory.

So if you pull out your teaching notes, let's start the journey together. And that's a great verse, and I actually memorized it years before I ever studied it. It was one of those verses that was wow.

But let me give you a little background on it, because it means even more when you study the background. It actually comes out of a story in the second chronicles 16, but the real story starts about verses 14 and 15. And it's about a king named Asa. And Asa was a good king at a bad time.

And this time in Asa's world, I mean, people are worshiping idols, they're sacrificing their kids to Moloch and other, I mean, it was horrendous what was happening. And most of the kings were involved in it. I mean, if you read first and second Samuel, first and second chronicles, it goes like this, bad king, bad king, bad king, bad king, bad king, okay king, bad king, bad king, good king, bad king, bad king.

I mean, there's not very many good kings. In fact, Asa's father didn't do a great job, and the one before him was worse. And Asa gets this heart for God, and it opens in chapter 14, and he honored God because he removed the idols.

And then he started a little building program. And then God gives him about 10 years of rest. He basically, in the little area of Judah, he obeys God. And it begins to get cleaned up, and God sees his heart, and then God brings a test.

There's the army, the Kushites, it's northern part of Africa. And they have well over a million soldiers, and he's got a decent army, but it's like, this is impossible. And so it goes out to battle, and he literally says, God, you know, no one can stand against you. And you read the prayer, I encourage you to do it. And he basically says, God, if you don't show up, if you don't do it, there is no way.

I mean, the odds are insurmountable, and they have this amazing victory that's supernatural by God. And it's so amazing that when he gets done with the victory, a prophet comes. And the prophet says, Asa, the Lord's pleased with you. And this is a great line, I read this afresh this morning. And if you will be with him, he will be with you.

Asa, if your life lines up, and if you'll be with him, and do life his way, and align with him, he will be with you. But if you turn away from him, Asa, he'll turn away from you. And Asa, like, got it. And he pulled together all the people. And he said, you know something, we, I mean, historically, we are so far off. And there's this national repentance. And there's this movement of God. And then another prophet comes. And so he gets 15 years of relative peace in a small area.

And then he gets another 20 years of massive success, building programs, removal of idols. There's even a little line in there where it talks about, he even removes the queen mother, his grandmother. See, when you start getting really serious with God, he does stuff in you and through you. And he does stuff in you and through you.

There'll be a few really touchy relationships that you got to step up, and be honest, and clear, and walk with him. And I think that text was saying Asa, from bottom to top, was honoring God. And then we pick it up in chapter 16. And it's the 36th year of his reign.

So he's had 35 years of success. And there's a great door of opportunity in verses one through six of his reign. In verses one through six of chapter 16, here's the door of opportunity. It looks like a bad situation.

But you can follow along. But what happens is that Judah and Israel are at odds. And the king of Israel is really making war on Judah right now. And he's got 36 years. And after time, you get a little bit older.

If you're not careful, you get comfortable. And you start relying on you instead of relying on God. And so he sees this problem. And so he hires some mercenaries, the king of Aram. He empties his treasury. And the king goes ahead, does what he said he would do. He attacks Israel.

Israel withdraws. Hey, great. Things are okay.

Now let me read, because I want you to pick up the text in verse seven of chapter 16 of 2 Chronicles. And he's thinking, I'm a good man. I've been a good king.

I've got 35 years under my belt. We had a problem. I had the resources, took care of the problem. At that time, Hanani, the seer, or the prophet, came to Asa, the king of Judah, and said to him, because you relied on the king of Aram and not on the Lord your God, the army of the king of Aram has escaped from your hand. See, God's plan, when he brought that difficulty, he wanted to use the biggest new difficulty for a greater and greater opportunity of victory.

But he said, you kind of blew it. And then he reminds him, we're not the great number of Cushites and Libyans, a mighty army with great numbers of chariots and horsemen, yet when you relied on the Lord, he delivered them into your hand. And then we get our verse. See, this is an axiomatic characteristic of God. This isn't just an Old Testament passage. He rebukes him and he says, for the eyes of the Lord go to and fro throughout the whole earth.

This is a principle. This is how God works. Don't you understand Asa? If you would have relied on him now like you used to, the hand of God, and the support of God, and the victory of God.

But instead, what you did is you grew comfortable, and you relied on you and on your resources, and you missed. And unfortunately, if you continue to read, Asa's response is a little less than we'd hoped, and he gets a little contrary, and throws a few people in prison, and he's got a little few people in prison, and it's really a bit of a sad ending. A great door of opportunity, a sad commentary, and here's what I tell you. When you read through this book, or when you read through church history, a lot of people start well in the Christian life. Very, very few finish well. If you're 50 years and older, and you've walked with the Lord for 15 to 20 years, let me put an asterisk in your soul. Chances are you will not finish well.

Unless you get intentional, unless you get focused, what happens is you get risk adverse. When you're desperate, when you didn't know anything, you'd read the Bible, it says it, I'll try it, I'll do it, God showed up, and then pretty soon he blesses your life, and then pretty soon you find a little comfort level, and you're operating on the verses of yesteryear, and then pretty soon it's God, how can you make my life work, and how can life not get too dangerous, and you stop relying on God. And if you're not careful, you end up just a nice moral religious person that misses what God called you to do in this life. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to be there, and I want to have a holy ambition. I want to make a difference with my life until the day I die. Well the question is will we answer God's call to make a significant impact at this pivotal moment in history.

I mean all you need is three minutes of watching Fox, or CNN, or one of the major stations to realize we've got nukes in a couple countries with terrorists with the ability to get their hands on them very quickly. We have we have an economy in Europe that because of outrageous debt, now they can't sustain the system they've developed. We now have a global economy where we had things teetering a couple years ago that we don't live independently anymore, and it is not only a flat world, but the whole thing can go under. The whole thing can go under, and yet we now have people that actually believe with all their heart that the way to paradise is to strap a bomb and intermittently go to various countries and blow up people in the name of a false belief system thinking that honors God.

Now I don't know about you, but if you think that just getting your kids in the right school, or if you're single finding the right person, or getting that good job, or someday living in a gated community, or remodeling the house is going to be the big answer of life, you are deluded. We are living in a window of opportunity of time that God is calling his church to step up and be difference makers, and so we got a great door of opportunity. I mean this is read church history. I mean the early church it wasn't born out of things were going great. There was crisis. There was crisis in the government. There was crisis in all these religions. There was crisis in philosophy. That produces a fertile environment where people like never before are open to not just hearing about Christ, but trusting him, and walking with him, and making a difference.

What will it mean for each of us? First of all it means we're going to have to model it. You can't impart what you don't possess. You got to model it. You can talk all day. You have to live it out. You can do God talk in the mall, but you got to do God walk at home, and God walk at the job, and God walk in your family.

So you have to model it. I was talking to a man on the plane. He's a answer to a three or four year prayer. This was bizarre, and got on the plane to come from Dallas, and a couple said excuse me that you know we're husband and wife. Would you mind if we sit here? Could you sit here, and we'll sit here, and said you know I'm traveling by myself.

That's fine. So they sit here, and I sit here, and a guy sits next to me, and I've been praying about how do you multiply groups, and God how does it really work, and I understand bits and pieces. I've been reading. I've been thinking. I've been looking at churches. I've looked at things around the world.

I know there's a way, and I've got pieces, but I don't understand it all, and I sit next to a guy that last 18 years was responsible for writing the strategy, and pioneering planning a hundred thousand churches around the world, and I said David are you tired? He said not particularly. I said that's very good because I'm getting my legal pad out, and you're going to be answering questions for the next three hours. He said fire away. I said brother I am, and I mean I told when I got done.

I said okay where can I get this? He put pieces together that I've never seen. I'm just telling you God is working in our midst, and it will require every person in this room, and every person in this church to discover the holy ambition that he has for you, but it starts where we model it. That doesn't mean we're perfect. That means we're making progress, and we say what we say, and we do what we do, and we mess up.

We say things like I messed up. Second it requires focus. The key to impact is concentration, and the key to concentration is elimination. If those last two quotes I've made sound a lot like Howard Hendrix, because it's Howard Hendrix my mentor. I was listening to a series, and it's called the ceiling of complexity. As you work hard, and you get focused, and you do a few simple things, then that grows, and then that grows, and that grows. Then you have to have meetings to talk about the simple things that grew into big things. Then you have to write reports about the simple things that grew into the big things, grew into the big things, and then you have to hire people, and or get involved in other things, and then pretty soon your life.

Anybody have stacks at home? Clutter, clutter, clutter, stack, stack, stacks, email, email, email, phone, phone, phone, and what actually many of you are very successful, and then what happens is you hit a ceiling, and you unwisely like me believe that the way you break through the ceiling is working harder and longer. That's not what the research demonstrates. The fact of the matter is your paradigm has to completely change, and you have to simplify your life, and you have to realize you get a focus, and there's a number of things that you've been doing, doing, doing which made you successful that you step back and say some of those I can't do anymore, and some people will be a little upset because I'm drawing a boundary, and I'm going to get back to the simple focused things that I'm best at that I love to do that caused the growth in my life, my family, my relationships. Most people today are flashlights, diffused light going multiple directions with high frustration and lack of productivity. People who are laser beams have discovered the few things they can do.

They say no to a lot of things and to a lot of people, and they do a few things extraordinarily well, and a laser beam can cut through a steel door, and a flashlight can see about 30 feet across the room. So which are you? And we have, we've believed, we started to believe that the invisible gun that we hold to our head, that someone else's hand is on it, and it's not. It's yours, and it's mine. I have to be here. I got to go here. I got to go here. I got to go here. My kids are involved in four youth sports, and I've got these three meetings, those two meetings. Well, time out.

Who signed up for that? Who said your kids have to be involved in that much? Well, I have to do this and this.

We're both working. Well, who says you both have to work? Well, we have to rent instead of buy.

Who says you have to buy? I mean, at the end of the day, you make choices. I make choices, and to determine everything, and some of the subtle choices you've made have ripple effects that have you living a life that you don't like, that's not fulfilling what you were made to do, and you keep hitting these walls. But it required that we model it, then it requires focus. The key to focus is concentration.

The key to concentration is elimination. And so it'll mean for each of us that God gives us a holy ambition. God is searching as intently today as he was in Asa's day to strongly support those whose hearts are fully his. He's looking for those who would dare to dream and to believe that they can, in fact, change the world. And I would really say it like this, change your world. No one knows your world and the needs like you do. It's the people you love.

There's certain things. We don't have to change the world if we will each change our little sections and the things that cause our heart to beat faster, and the needs and the hurts that cause something inside of us that where the Spirit of God is pulled out and says, if you had more time, you could really care and make a difference. And we keep telling the Spirit, well, I will later when things slow down, and I will later when I have more time, and I will later when I have more resources.

And I got news for you, that later's never coming. Chip will join us here in studio with his application in just a minute. You've been listening to the first part of his message, Develop a Dislocated Heart, from his series Holy Ambition, Turning God-Shaped Dreams into Reality. Do you long for your life to make a difference? Is God stirring something in your soul, but you don't know how to get started? Well, through this series, Chip explains how those deep-seated convictions and promptings can become God-shaped realities. Stay with us as Chip lays out a six-step process for ordinary people like you and me to follow God's calling and impact our world in unbelievable ways. For more information about Holy Ambition or our series resources, go to livingontheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003 or livingontheedge.org.

App listeners, tap Special Offers. Our Bible teacher, Chip Ingram, is with me now. Chip, we're just getting started in this series about turning our God-shaped dreams into reality. And if I'm being honest, when I think about this idea of following a Holy Ambition, I would never have considered the story of Nehemiah. So take a minute, will you, and share what led you to this series?

I'd be glad to, Dave. You know, I was a pretty young pastor in Santa Cruz, California, and I think there was some connection with a major ministry that was discipling business people. And so one of the business leaders in the church said, I got a call from this ministry, and they're going to bring about eight or ten really high-profile businessmen to Pebble Beach. And some of them are believers. There's, you know, a few of them that are kind of just seeking the Lord and checking things out. They're going to play golf for a couple days, and they would like you to come and teach the Bible. And I said, oh, okay.

Well, that sounds good. I just finished teaching the book of Nehemiah, and I had prepared a little talk for them. But as I got in the back seat of the car, and we're driving to Pebble Beach, and I thought to myself, oh, Lord, these are powerful men, and they're business people.

And, you know, some know the Bible, and some don't. And my mind just drifted, I mean, immediately back to, well, Nehemiah was like a business guy. He wasn't a prophet, or, you know, he wasn't a priest. He was this guy with leadership skill.

And you know what? What I realized was there was a very clear pattern about he took something from nothing and developed it into God's fulfilled plan. And I, on the back of a sheet of paper, literally jotted about five or six high-level characteristics of the kind of leaders from Nehemiah's life that make a difference in taking dreams and ideas into reality to help other people.

And, you know, I didn't think that much about it. They were scribbled little notes, but it went really well, and then we had a discussion. And a few months later, I was invited to speak at Founders Week at Moody Bible, and they said, we would like you to write a book. And I said, well, I just taught a series on Nehemiah, and it was like my story. I mean, that is the kind of man I've tried to be, and I never dreamed I'd be a pastor. They said, okay, let's go with that.

Well, that was about 20 years ago, and that's how holy ambition got birthed. Thanks, Chip. Well, we hope you'll make plans to be with us for the next several programs. And let me also encourage you to order the newest edition of Chip's book, too, which we've discounted for this series. Simply go to livingontheedge.org or give us a call at 888-333-6003.

App listeners, tap Special Offers. Well, now here's Chip with some final thoughts from today's message. As we close, I want to talk about this phrase, holy ambition. When I say that, often those two words don't go together in people's mind. Holiness has this idea of something that is set apart, that is given to God, that it's pure, it's things that God does. And the word ambition, at least from most of our own experiences about, you know, me and my stuff and how many likes I have and how many people are looking at my posts and, you know, how famous I am.

But here's what I would say. Those two words go together. You and I have been made for a very special purpose that no one in all the world can fulfill quite like us. Ephesians 2 10 says that we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto a good work that He preordained from the foundations of the earth.

He wants to birth something in you and you don't have to be famous, it doesn't have to be big, but there's something that He wants you to do that's holy. But He wants to birth a sense of ambition. Ambition says, I've got to do that. And there's drive and there's motivation and there's planning and there's energy and there's perseverance. And so I just want to encourage you to stay with me on this journey. You know, Down Deep, we all long to make a difference.

That's what this is about. So here's my prayer for you. Holy Father, will you help my brothers and sisters to join with me for this whole series?

And would you birth in them very clearly the holy ambition you have for them? In Jesus' name, amen. Great word, Chip. Thanks. Well, as we wrap up, I want to thank those of you who make this program possible through your generous financial support. Your gifts help us create programs, purchase airtime and develop additional resources to help Christians live like Christians. If you've been blessed by the Ministry of Living on the Edge, would you consider sending a gift today? Call us at 888-333-6003 or go to livingontheedge.org. App listeners, tap donate. Your support is greatly appreciated. Well, until next time, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.